MySQL and the UTF-8 disharmony

The problem: In case you may not know this, MySQL’s “utf8” is not the same as UTF-8 ! And, to my knowledge, this is happening in all MySQL flavors (MySQL, MariaDB, PerconaDB, etc). The “utf8” (also known as “utf8mb3”) encoding supports up to three bytes per character. The real UTF-8 encoding uses up to four…